Honoyeta is the serpent-skinned culture hero of Kalauna and the wider Goodenough (Nidula) tradition whose myth accounts for the coming of death. An outwardly repulsive old man clad in a wrinkled snake-skin, he sloughed the skin at night or while bathing to reveal a beautiful youth. He kept two wives, the elder of whom loathed his reptilian guise; when the cast skin was discovered and burned he could no longer renew himself. In grief and anger he resolved that humankind would thereafter die outright rather than shed their skins and grow young again as snakes do, and lying down he fixed mortality upon the living. His anger is identified with the burning sun, with heat and drought, and his myth is guarded as a personal charter by particular magicians. Sources differ on whether he finally ascended into the sky or withdrew eastward across the sea.